Spec-Driven-Development vs Temporal AI

Temporal's product is the programming model: you write business logic in Go, Java, Python, TypeScript, .NET, PHP, Ruby or Rust, and the Temporal Service persists running state so a crashed worker or flaky API resumes at the step where it stopped — no checkpointing or recovery code. Activities auto-retry with backoff, four timeout classes and heartbeating; Signals, Queries and Updates mutate a running execution mid-flight; Workflow Streams add live interactivity; Durable Timers sleep for months. Its AI story is concrete: durable agents via the OpenAI Agents SDK and Google ADK run LLM and tool calls as Activities, and Serverless Workers host agents on Amazon Bedrock AgentCore, with AWS Lambda (public preview) and GCP Cloud Run (pre-release). October 2026 news adds a Pi coding agent walkthrough and an Oso security team building native agent authorization.

Spec-Driven-Development solves a different problem entirely: alignment between coding agents. It runs a four-question interview (or retrofit mode with [TO VERIFY] assumptions) and emits requirements.md with REQ-xxx IDs and acceptance criteria, design.md, and tasks.md with atomic steps linked back to requirements (TASK-007 [REQ-001]). It then writes CLAUDE.md, .cursorrules, .windsurfrules, .github/copilot-instructions.md and .aider.conf.yml (beta), all sharing one Universal Instruction Block that makes each agent cite requirement IDs and follow a divergence protocol. One operates at runtime; the other operates before code exists.

Spec-Driven-Development costs nothing: it is MIT-licensed, so the only spend is the tokens your coding agent burns generating spec files. There is no seat count, no usage meter, no plan to upgrade, and no vendor to negotiate with — the 'pricing analysis' is essentially a one-liner.

Temporal is freemium and genuinely two purchases in one. Self-hosting the Temporal Service is an infrastructure cost (compute, storage, and the engineers who run it), while Temporal Cloud is the managed path where you pay for what you actually use. The static facts do not list dollar figures, so do not budget from this page — get a quote. What the data does tell you is which enterprise line items to expect: SSO via SAML, audit logging, SOC 2/HIPAA positioning, and an SLA-backed support path, plus Cloud UI Strict Session Mode now generally available, which enforces a 15-minute inactivity timeout and a 12-hour maximum session for SAML-authenticated users. September 2026 brought Standalone Activities to GA across all six primary SDKs and a $550M raise at a $12.55B valuation. A free markdown generator and a funded durable-execution platform do not compete on price because they are not on the same bill.